... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 44) Winter 2002 Last| Contents| Next Issue 44 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com) This is the third volume in Caro's biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their equal and deserves the praise it has received. Even if we ignore the story of LBJ, this contains an account of the workings of the US Senate in the ...

... The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism Michael Carlson D iscussing the recently released Senate report on American torture, my friend Michael Goldfarb quoted Senator Frank Church, speaking when his Senate committee's report was issued in 1975,1 in the wake of the Rockefeller and Pike reports, the latter not released but leaked by Daniel Schorr in the Village Voice newspaper. Lest we forget, Church was marginalized, lost his Senate seat to a well-funded campaign, and, as we know, the domestic surveillance by the CIA and NSA and whoever else continued unchecked, at least until the Snowden revelations. Church's committee was regularly lied to by its witnesses and obstructed by the Ford administration ...

... , the patron of Torrijos' current enemy Orlando Bosch. According to an FBI report on Frank Sturgis in 1972, when Hunt recruited him and Barker for Watergate "sources in Miami say that he is now associated with organised crime activities". (emphasis added) (56) When this FBI claim was made part of the highly publicised Senate Hearings in February 1973 on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray, the New York Times and Washington Post, then locked in battle with Nixon, declined to report it. The press interviews with Artime and Sturgis about their anti-narcotics activities were likewise ignored at the time, as were all the growing indications that the White House, under ...

... ; and, at least under the Ford Administration, its contact with foreign parafascism and neo-fascism has never been more overt. Perhaps the key elements in this lobby today are- on the outside- the various committees organised from the public relations office of Marvin Liebman on Madison Avenue, and- on the inside- the Congressional power mustered by Senator Strom Thurmond. This coalition is strengthened inside Congress by the pay-off system refined most recently by the unregistered South Korean lobbyist, Tongsun Park, and outside it by the old military-industrial coalition, the American Security Council. All four elements have worked in collaboration since the days when Chinese nationalist gold, via a Mafia-tainted public relations firm, first ...

... October 1980 between a claimed emissary of the Khomeini government and the chief foreign policy adviser of the Reagan-Bush Presidential Campaign, Richard V. Allen, at which a deal was discussed to hold the hostages until after the election ensuring Carter's defeat. Also at the meeting were Allen's aide, Laurence Silberman, and Robert McFarlane, then an aide to Senator John Tower of the Senate Armed Services Committee and later Reagan's third National Security Adviser and a key figure in Irangate. An earlier but less detailed report of this same meeting ran in the Washington Post on November 29, 1986 (Robert Woodward and Walter Pincus). The meeting took place in a Washington, D.C. hotel not long ...

... into Los Angeles during the 1980s. Parallel stories have appeared in provincial papers before, and been ignored. But San Jose isn't in Silicon Valley for nothing; the Mercury News boosted Webb's stories with its state-of-the-art website and a political storm began to blow. Soon Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus was calling for an investigation, and the Senate Intelligence Committee had scheduled hearings. Belatedly, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all recognized that, this time around, they couldn't ignore the story. But instead of investigating the CIA, they investigated their fellow journalists at the Mercury News. Quoting each other's stories to strengthen their common case, editorialists, ...

... war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. He claims much more, but first a reminder of the events themselves. Within days of 9/11 a number of people received letters containing anthrax spores, the attendant publicity greatly swelling the panic following the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attacks.1 Among them were ABC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and two Democratic senators critical to rapid Congressional approval of a Patriot Bill conferring wide- ranging new powers upon the President in a situation George Bush had quickly defined as war. This trio were not directly harmed but five less prominent figures, including two postal workers, died within days. Many others, across a wide geographical area, were infected. It ...

... H W Bush just as his son, President George W Bush, who had been in business with another Bin Laden brother, Salem, was flying down to Florida to publicise a Sarasota school's reading programme.2 In another DC hotel on September 11 the director general of Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Mahmood Ahmed, was having breakfast with Senator Bob Splitting some of these long URLs to fit the footnote space may produce problems. If the link fails, copy the URL and paste it into the search engine box and check for gaps caused by line breaks. 1 <https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/CarlyleHead1.html> <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles ...

... to Gestapu. (34) In 1957-58, CIA infiltrated arms and personnel in support of the PRRI-Permesta regional rebellions against Sukarno. These operations were nominally covert, even though an American plane and pilot were captured, and the CIA efforts were accompanied by an offshore task force of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. (35) In 1975 a Senate Select Committee studying the CIA discovered what it called 'some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno'; but, after an initial investigation of the November 1957 assassination attempt at Cikini, the Committee did not pursue the matter. (36) On August 1, 1958, after the failure of the CIA-sponsored PRRI-Permesta regional rebellions ...

... know – as a form of ID.3 Fifteen of the hijackers somehow obtained Floridian driving licences (the issuing of those licences being handled by Florida's DMV, overseen at cabinet level in then-Governor Bush's executive) .4 The official investigation of 9/11 was led by two of Jeb's contemporary fellow Floridians, Representative Porter Goss (Rep.) and Senator Bob Graham (Dem.). Goss represented 2 Huffman Aviation has now closed. There is another flight school called Huffman Aviation in Texas, home state of Jeb's brother George. The owner of that flight school assures me that this is a coincidence 3 <http://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/07/10/ ...